It"s a Crazy Wonderful Life

This is a blog about my family and the crazy life in the Sims Household. We have 5 children, ranging from 14 to 5, and seem to be going in all different directions sometimes. The purpose of this blog is to help keep our friends and family up to date on what is going on in our lives.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

This past week has been ridiculously crazy. Our school had our annual Spring Carnival on Friday and it is one of my favorite events to help plan for. Our committee has been working on it since January. The night was a huge success. We sold 800 slices of pizza, who knows how many cans of soda, gave away tons of prizes, and helped the families at our school to have a great family night. All in all it was a great night and totally worth all the many hours of planning and hard work that went into making it possible.

Mike and the boys had the chance to go to the Father and Son camp-out on Friday night with member of our ward. It sounds like they had a great time. They shot guns, roasted marshmallows and hot dogs and chased grasshoppers. What more could any little boy want?

Also this weekend our Young Women held our annual girl's camp fundraiser. This too was a raging success. We pre-sold lasagnas that could be frozen and used later. Our girls sold a total of 101 lasagnas and paid for at least half of our camp costs. Yeah girls!!! So on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I did the shopping. The shopping list included the following: 46 #10 cans of whole tomatoes, 30 pounds of ground beef, 30 pounds of Italian sausage, 30 large onions, 70 pounds of mozzarella cheese, 2 large bottles of chopped garlic, 48 boxes of lasagna noodles, 55 9x9 foil pans, 46 9 x 13 foil pans, 3 large pkgs. of heavy duty foil, and address labels. After my shopping (you should have seen the back of the suburban) I came home and chopped onions, cooked up my portion of the sausage (the other YW leaders helped cook up all the meat ahead of time), then I divided all the ingredients in to batches. We had sisters in the ward that had volunteered to help cook some of the sauce. So then, I took and delivered one recipe worth of ingredients to each of them. They were big batches too, each recipe calls for 3 # 10 cans of tomatoes. On Saturday the Young Women and leaders gathered at the church to assemble our lasagnas. I was amazed by how quickly everything went. We actually assembled 106 (we made a few extra) lasagnas in an hour. Yes, I said ONE hour. Then we cleaned up, did the dishes, divided the lasagnas into delivery routes and were on our way out of the church after just 2 hours. It was a great time and I am so proud of the girls for working so hard.

After the Lasagnas, Mike and I packed the kids in the car and headed to Denver to a BBQ at his coworkers home. It was a farewell party to Mike's boss in the Denver office who is headed off to the Chicago office. It was a nice dinner and was great to visit and get to know some of the people he has been working with.

Looking back to catch up on things since my last post, Kaylee has been running track this season and has had a great season. She actually made the varsity team for the 200 meter and the 800 meter relay. She has improved her style so much this year and her times just keep improving each time. She has her conference meet this next Saturday. I will post about that next week.

Ryan was invited a couple of months ago to participate in a podcast group with his teacher and a couple of other boys in his class at school. It was a district wide competition and several schools participated and the teams were from all levels of schools. So Ryan's team competed against kids their own age as well as teams from high school. They created a podcast about poverty and education. The podcasts were all shown last week and judged for the contest. Unfortunately, Ryan's team did not win, but I am very excited to go to the reception where they will show all the podcasts on May 4th.

Tiffany participated the last few months in a jump rope class after school one day a week. They learned different tricks and had a lot of fun. Last week was their jump rope show. Tiffany and a friend choreographed a really cool performance and it was so fun to watch.

Jake has been really busy and is doing great in school. He is staying busy playing in the park on his bike, roller blades, and catching fish and crawdads int he pond.

Kyle tries to keep up with Jake and do everything the older kids do. He let me cut his hair the other day, but the only way he would let me do it was if I let him wear his goggles. I will have to post a picture later. Kyle has been such a character lately. He comes up with some of the funniest things to say. The other day we were in the car and Kaylee said something about having her own opinion. Mike responded by saying "Opinions are like buttholes, everyone has one and most of them stink" Kyle responds with "Anyone want to smell my opinion?" he is very quick witted and keeps us laughing.

Well, I think I better be running off, this is getting long. If you want to know what else I have been up to lately, check out my scrapbooking blog here, my digital scrapbook store here, or my t-shirt shop here.